Electrical and Computer Engineering ECE Guest Lecturer Series

Amy Lynn Oldenburg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Designing Novel Contrast Methods in Optics and Acoustics: Magnetomotive and Diffusion-Sensitive Imaging"

Abstract: There are many parallels between ultrasonic imaging (US) and optical coherence tomography (OCT). They both produce images of biological tissue by detection of back-reflected waves, and they both are widely employed biomedical imaging modalities. However, US and OCT images often lack specific contrast to tissue features of interest, and contrast-enhancing methods are needed to expand their capabilities. In this talk I will describe the process of developing two novel contrast imaging methods: (1) magnetomotive imaging, in which magnetic nanoparticles are employed as imaging agents and magnets are coupled with the imaging hardware, and (2) diffusion-sensitive imaging, in which gold nanorods act as sentinels of their nanoscopic environment by merit of their constrained Brownian diffusion. These methods are enabling new applications in detecting thrombosis, studying extracellular matrix in tumor formation, and mapping tissue viscoelastic properties.

Biography: Amy Oldenburg received her B.S. in Applied Physics from Caltech, and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the Beckman Institute at UIUC where she studied novel biomedical imaging contrast methods under the direction of Stephen Boppart. Dr. Oldenburg founded the Coherence Imaging Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, where she is currently an Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy. Her laboratory focuses on novel optical and acoustic biological and biomedical imaging methods including nanoparticle contrast agents, elastography, and cellular motility.